Flitting amidst the lumbering feet of wooly mammoths and rhinos during the last ice age, intrepid squirrels—prototypical futures traders—interred about a half-million seeds and fruits in burrows they built by the banks of a Russian river. Alas, the seed trade went sour when wind-displaced soil sealed the stash, with reliable old permafrost locking it up for 30,000 years.
Unhampered by mammoths, relaxed Russian scientists have taken a cell from the placenta of one of the fruits and grown a living plant. They grew 36 of them in fact—ancient species that haven’t lived since the squirrels horded them. The coelacanth, upon hearing the news, breached for the very first time. TV personalities Larry King, Simon Cowell, and others who plan to have their bodies cryogenically frozen also leapt, King not so high.